Puh-thetic

“It is easy for academics to talk about their leftist commitments; it is harder for them to act upon them in public, in the world.” In other words, academics who don’t “act on” their commitments are just a bunch of fakers. Their lifestyles are radically at odds with the political commitments (or “principles,” “ideals,” or whatever) they claim to uphold. If they invite each other to their dinner parties, talk “uncritically” about art, eat and drink well, engage in personal hobbies in their “free time,” have families, talk about their work in difficult, non-ordinary language (i.e. that foresakes, reflects upon, or works to undo language as “communication”) – many more complaints can be added to this list – they can’t possibly be the radicals they purport to be. Their habits of living distance them too much from “the people.” Unless they somehow intervene in a material practice of renegade politics, their commitments are vain, pretentious, useless – a form of careerist posturing that does little other than secure their institutional location and professional status as “dissident intellectuals.” They can then use their political commitments as a form of cultural capital to belittle, intimidate, and shame students and colleagues who don’t measure up to their standard of ideological correctness. What sad creatures they are. End of story.

Purple Rain

This film is apparently making a comeback, if it ever left. Does it have anything to do with Prince playing the Superbowl halftime show? I have heard it referenced by smart people on three occasions in the past week. I still need to see it.

Dissidence

If you appear to take a position without considering others, or simply defend one position among others, one is said to be “lacking balance” or “biased.” Defending a position based on a set of beliefs that one doesn’t or cannot or can barely put into practice (because of external constraint, whether absence of funding, or working to support others financially, or wanting to spend time with your family, or disagreement with colleagues, or sectarianism, or melancholy, or mental illness, or horror at the intransigence of dominant ideology, or seeking pleasure and avoiding pain) appears petulant, peurile. And if you defend a belief without acting upon the consequences of your belief, you are a hypocrite, or pathetic. Thus dissidence in the US gets assigned to youthfulness, conservatism to maturity; the chronologically young welcome difference, mature adults are set in their ways. Children can dissent from (or appear to dissent from) normativity because they don’t "have responsibilities"; that is to say, no one depends upon them to eat, or be housed, or clothed, to be educated, or receive medical care. And the primary locus for ethical relation is, of course, the family. (“Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.”) An adult active in the world must be responsible to him- or herself because others rely upon him or her to survive. ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.") Those who challenge the dominant order – the order which enables life – have no one to support, and are thus “being selfish.” Or vain (cf., Sloterdijk on cynicism). Dissidence is thus seen as a way of displacing their personal frustrations: hysterically acting out, or narcissistically drawing attention to themselves, or getting even with their parents, or getting laid. Dissidence is thus unethical. On the liberal account, youth also dissent because they don’t understand the complexity of an issue; once they learn how complicated it is, an activist will realize that it is not so polarized (“black and white”), that there is not simply a right side and a wrong side, that reality is actually rather ambiguous, and that it is often difficult to assign virtue or blame. Dissidence is thus intellectually shallow. Youth also dissent because they are misled by older leaders who have competiting priorities, and who cynically manipulate young people for personal gain. Dissidence is thus traversed by cynicism on the one hand, and delusion on the other. In none of these explanations does one find an acknowledgement that counternormativity manifested in a set of firm beliefs can be the outcome of rigorous study, hard thinking, and self-criticism. This is not surprising, as the notion of counternormativity is practically illegible to people who say such things, and in any case, it is all too often the case that what looks dissident reinforces what it aims to counteract (thus Horkheimer & Adorno on the culture industry, Marcuse on repressive desublimation, Foucault on the liberal progressive subject, Zizek on “self-realization,” Lyotard on metanarrative, Nietzche on Schopenhauer, Heidegger on Nietzsche, Derrida on Heidegger, and Stiegler on Derrida).